Cloud Computing

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in 2015 Mark Zuckerberg gave a keynote speech for the second year in a row and to me it really seemed like keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. After all, WhatsApp and Facebook are responsible for billions of lost dollars in messaging revenue for global wireless carriers.

I couldn’t help but think of this as I met with Acision yesterday. Some years back I was in their corporate offices in Texas where they told me the threat from advertising based tech models to SMS was unsustainable.

We all know the M2M and IoT spaces are growing like crazy... Our own growing M2M Evolution and IoT Evolution shows are just a few examples of how the marketplaces are on fire as a seamlessly never-ending flow of new customers comes to each iteration of these events.

While many of the conferences in the space are doing well, I have to say the prospects for one of the players in the market - Cradlepoint might be even better. They seem to be in the right place at the right time with the right products.

The company's AER 2100 is a wired router with built-in redundancy - allowing up to two wireless modems to be activated and even a second wired connection. The device is making tremendous gains in the IoT space.

In a conversation with Ken Hosac of the company today I got to learn how security is becoming another major reason for the company's growth.

It’s exciting to see that cloud is being embraced by so many. From small businesses to the largest, cloud computing solutions are eagerly being rolled out for CRM, telephony, UC, accounting, storage and anything else you can think of. While the benefits of the tech are clear, what we need to worry about now is management of these cloud solutions.

In fact, we should be aware of the trend we see in cloud as it follows similar ones in telecom.

Skype has finally decided to bring its VoIP and video platform to the web in an effort to better compete with a new wave of companies leveraging browser-based WebRTC technology. Today, they announced Skype for Web (Beta) which works with Chrome, Firefox and IE 10 or above. Recently, I mentioned how Microsoft has really been making some smart moves lately which make the company more relevant and ORTC/WebRTC support is certainly one of the most important areas in the communications space. My colleague Doug Mohney agrees when he says this isn't your father's Microsoft.

The simple reality about this move is it may make it tougher to compete with Skype as a pure WebRTC video or audio play as Skype obviously has a bigger name and bundles its solution with other Microsoft products.

Last night, GENBAND hosted a gala premiere at Ruby Skye in San Francisco for its official Kandy launch - the transitional solution from the communications hardware company which positions them as a seller of cloud-solutions. The point of the event was two-fold... Establish the brand Kandy into the minds of attendees who consisted of the media, analysts, customers and partners and also to show off the partner ecosystem which is beginning to flourish.

The company seemed to nail it on both parts - the extravagant event was not inexpensive and it was choreographed perfectly. Many attendees told me they couldn't believe the investment.

Amazon has made its name in ecommerce and cloud but its next frontier may be productivity applications and in the process, they may disrupt the entire enterprise software and cloud market. Zocalo is a new service from the company which allows the sharing of numerous document types with full version reviewed support and the ability to store files in specific geographical locations for compliance reasons. It works across devices (pretty much all of them), continents (files can be stored in the US and Europe (Ireleand) as of today) and can communicate with Active Directory if required. File transfers are encrypted and documents can be shared internally and externally.

As NFV and SDN usher in a new era of software telcos, there are just so many pieces which have to be put into place to enable solutions from disparate vendors to interoperate smoothly. Moreover, carriers are always looking for one throat to choke and NFV really opens up the carrier network is so many new ways that determining who is responsible for issues is more difficult.

Security has always been a major focus for operators. Indeed, when their networks were proprietary and thought to be bulletproof, it was determined a simple whistle distributed in a box of Captain Crunch cereal could give access to hackers.

Over the past few decades as telephony has opened up, we have seen the advent of APIs on computers which allowed better control of voice communications. Things like softphones and PC PBXs startd to appear in the nineties. Soon thereafter we saw voice get packetized as it travelled over IP networks. Big data, analytics and a host of technologies have evolved to a point where voice will be heading to a new frontier – and smart voice will be born.

GENBAND Perspectives 14 kicks off this morning - expect the live blog here... Last night the company hosted a networking reception where I had a chance to speak randomly with one of the company's customers in Mississippi - an ILEC becoming a CLEC. The person I spoke with said they actually purchased the equipment from Nortel just before that company went under and GENBAND acquired the assets. He went on to say he is very happy with the road map GENBAND is on and how they handled the acquisition.